Transatlantic union forms to face labor's challenges

At a time when the future of social accords, free market capitalism and the use of state regulation and intervention to rescue faltering economies are under intense scrutiny, the re-assertion of trade union viewpoints on an international level could lead to creative exchanges with global employers. The formation of the new transatlantic union Workers Uniting has brought the unionism of 2008 into focus, creating an opportunity for creative exchanges with global employers.

The increasing strength and breadth of expression by trade unions on global topics was in evidence in the first week of July when John Evans, General Secretary of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, criticized the results coming from the G8 summit meeting in Hokkaido, Japan.

"The G8 say in their statement that they wish to enhance cooperation with all stakeholders including trade unions -- and yet they have ignored much of what we have called for: coordinated measures to support and rebalance growth, action to create 'green jobs' and decent work as well as encouraging workplace agreements between unions and management as part of the action to combat climate change," he said.

The G8 group was also criticized by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) for barely addressing the social dimension of the emerging global economy. Instead, said the ITUC, the agenda looked like a business meeting, discussing the rights and compensation of foreign investors and the usual warnings regarding protectionism. The ITUC represents 168 million workers in 155 countries and territories and has 311 national affiliates, including the AFL-CIO.

This expression of ITUC's opinion came a week after the signing of an agreement between Unite, the United Kingdom's biggest union with more than 2 million members, and United Steel Workers (USW), the largest private sector union in North America with over 1,800 local unions and 1.2 million members, to create the first operating global union, known as Workers Uniting. The new global trade union will represent 3 million working people covering all industrial sectors in the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Canada and the Caribbean.

Leo W. Gerard, president of USW, said, "This union is crucial for challenging the growing power of global capital. Globalization has given financiers license to exploit workers in developing countries at the expense of our members in the developed world. Only global solidarity among workers can overcome this sort of global exploitation wherever it occurs."

Gerard also said that the days when a regional union could take on a regional employer had passed, and the ability of a national union to take on a national employer has fast been eroding. He noted that in the past 20 years, the global economy has increasingly become borderless, having loyalty and responsibilities to no particular country.

"So if we don't create an institution that can respond to that, that has loyalty to workers, and to the dreams and aspirations of workers, then we'll get run over," said Gerard.

Nearly half of the world's unemployed are young people between 18 and 24 years old. Even in the petro-cash flush Middle East there is acute anxiety about the ability of the state and industry to provide training and jobs for the upcoming wave of youthful job hunters. Social responsibility is not a soft topic, but a major plank in state security and citizen welfare.

Another topic under the union spotlight is the gap in both quality and quantity of work between women and men. Women are much more likely than men to work in the informal economy with low social protection and little job security. A new ITUC report, "The Global Gender Pay Gap," says that on average, women are paid 16 percent less than their male counterparts and that educated women often find themselves on the wrong side of an even bigger pay gap compared to men with similar education.

The Global Unions Research Network (GURN) lists corporate governance as an area in which trade unions have a key role to play in the reform of global and national agendas. The compliance of corporations to domestic, regional and international laws, as well as accountability to workers and shareholders has become a major issue in today's world of large, multinational corporations. GURN states that capital is a much more mobile factor of production than labor, making a sort of "caravan capitalism" possible. Governments, by competing with one another to deliver "investment-friendly" environments, are increasingly dismantling their own labor laws. One of the most important responses by trade unions against this trend is to increase transnational coordination among unions in order to facilitate collective bargaining on a regional level through transnational organizing and campaigning.

In the December 2007 issue of World of Work, the magazine of the International Labor Organization, Andrew Bibby suggests that unions are finding new ways to respond creatively to globalization. In September 2007, 1,800 activists from 30 countries demonstrated outside IBM premises in solidarity with Italian IBM workers who were in dispute with the company. The protest took place on Second Life, a virtual world existing on the Internet that has about 7 million subscribers. The demonstrators wearing union T-shirts were Second Life "avatars." Bibby adds that trade union adjustment to a globalized economy is not unproblematic and remains best described as a work-in-progress.

The increasingly tight-knit nature of global value chains, which bind together primary producers, manufacturers, intermediaries and eventual retailers, could be seen as providing new opportunities for exporting good labor relations to companies and contractors operating upstream, says another GURN study. As anyone living in a developing economy with persistent high unemployment will know, if the human right to have "decent work" is unavailable to a large segment of a country's population, those managers and workers who hold down "good jobs" will sleep in relative insecurity. The success of Workers Uniting could lead to good jobs and good labor relations driving out bad ideologies.

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